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| Sancho makes house calls |
Today you come home from work at five o'clock like you do every single day and you open the front door and the house is so quiet and so still like it always is. Your wife is in the basement again.
You know better than to go and knock on the basement door, but you do anyway and the only response you get is her shouting for you to stop intruding on her private time, and that if you want any type of goddamn dinner cooked, then you'd better be patient.
The words cut you like the blade of a razor, and you can feel faint sting of a tear from the corner of your left eye. She's been cheating on you in that dingy cellar, all this time. It was right there in front of your face. You put your briefcase down in the foyer of the home that you bought when you were married ten years ago, when you promised to love and cherish each other forever and forever and forever, and your left hand creeps up to the pocket of your sports jacket to the revolver you "borrowed" from your brother's gun case a couple of days ago, all the while wondering what in the hell you were really going to do with it.
It's solved. You step in front of the mirror, assume a wide legged stance, and you brandish the gun at your reflection. You tell your reflection that your sick of the lies, your sick of the deceit, and that you've known all this time that the reason she comes out of the basement every day smelling of too much perfume with a huge grin on her face is NOT because she's doing her 'arts and crafts'.
You tell your reflection the reason she comes out of the basement looking and smiling like a teenage girl is because that hotrod of a poolboy is down in that basement with her every single day, and you've known all this time about the infidelity. Your going to finally do something about it.
You lower the gun and point it at yourself in the mirror and you go click.
Click.
Click click click click.
You smile at yourself, then you feel sick.
You load the pistol.
Before you can chicken out, you stomp across the hall and down the stairs to the basement door. You raise one penny loafer-clad foot and and kick hard, and you go through that basement door like an X-ray through wood.
Inside, you stop, lower jaw falling against your chest. This is definetely not what you expected. Your mouth tries to move, to form speech, and finally you find the words as you stare back into your wife's shocked face, her eyes wide open with alarm.
"You're shrinking heads in the basement of OUR home?!" You roar.
Your wife flinches as if stricken. "Jim, I..." she stammers.
"You know how I feel about voodoo!"
"It's NOT voodoo!"
"I can't believe this is how your spending your time, hunched over these herbs and spices, instead of banging the poolboy, like I thought you were!"
You see her eyes flash with a righteous indignation and she puffs out her chest. "Well, maybe if you paid more attention to me instead of working day and night, then I wouldn't need to have a shrunken head museum under the house," she replies matter-of-factly.
Your distracted for a moment by a huge bubble that percolates out of a giant cauldron on the workbench. "This is hardly sanitary."
"Don't you lecture me, this is my calling, and anyways you weren't supposed to come in."
You sag visibly, like an animal taking a bullet. You are about to argue, but suddenly it dawns on you that you don't have the heart. You miss her desperately. You take a step closer to her. "Honey, what happened to us?"
She looks down, pushing around a pebble on the ground with one of her toes. "I don't know. Ever since Tommy died in that silo explosion, we just...drifted apart."
"That wasn't my fault! Our lives were changed that day, all because of one condemned silo. Why do you think I've been working day and night since? I won't rest until I rid the world of all silos! ALL OF THEM!" You slam your fist down on the workbench. A couple of shrunken heads hop off the bench and onto the floor.
"Dammit Jim, be careful!"
"Sorry, I just miss him so damn much sometimes."
"Honey...listen, I was going to save this for our anniversary...but I think now is the time."
Your wife bends under the workbench and carefully slides out a small box. She holds it in both hands with a measured caution, as though it held diamonds, or cocaine. She offers it to you, her eyes glistening wet with trace beginnings of tears.
You take the box from her and put your hand on the lid. You look up at her and she nods. You lift the lid and gasp.
Inside is the shrunken head of your Mother. Her hair is the consistency of boiled wire, and the skin is mottled and fossilized by chemicals you'll never in your life be able to name. Delicate black stitching adhere the lips shut, and the eyes. Looking at the dried relic, you're struck by the realization that it will stay this way forever.
"It's....it's....beautiful," you hear yourself say.
"You know how her grave was dug up a week after her funeral and the cops thought it was the damn Sicilians, avenging the honor of their family by robbing your sainted Mother's grave? Well, I have something else to confess. I robbed the grave of your Mother to shrink her head, put it in a box, and rekindle the passionate flames of our love."
"I always thought it was weird that Sicilians would want to desecrate her grave. My Mother was Puerto Rican," you reply.
"I know, honey," your wife whispers. "I know."
You put down the box and make love among the heads.
